It’s every guy’s dream. Start a beer company after college with your best friend. After years of discussions in the bullpen where the two former pitchers spent much of their college years, that’s exactly what Tommy and Wilson did. United by their love of beer and desire to run their own company, the two bucked conventional wisdom and launched Snake Bite USA – a mixture of lager and hard cider.

With little more than a passion for the idea and a willingness to learn, the two have built Snake Bite into a recognizable brand in the Bay Area.

I joined Tommy and Wilson for lunch and a six-hour tour of Northern, visiting with their distributors and delivering pitches to prospective stores. Along the way, I learned about the ups and downs of Snake Bite’s early years and gained an appreciation for the way passion can lead to success.

By early October 2013 time was running out. Robby Cuthbert had spent the last two years creating artistic furniture. Now, living with his girlfriend in Palo Alto, the money from a previous Kickstarter campaign was running low, and he figured he had a few months to see if he could turn his project into a sustainable business or move on.

On a whim, Cuthbert posted an album of his work on Reddit, a massive user-generated site where posts rise and fall on the homepage based on reader feedback. Within a day, Cuthbert’s album rose all the way to the number one spot, where it stayed for twelve hours.

Cuthbert’s website went from generating 100 views a day to 175,000 the day his album appeared on Reddit. Orders flooded in. Magazines requested interviews. He was invited to design shows across the country.

I caught up with Cuthbert in his one-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto to hear about his long road to overnight success and learn about the creative spirit that got him there.